How Punk Broke the Binary

New Books in Popular Culture · Jul 3, 2025 · 1h 6m

When singer Debbie Harry helped form Blondie in 1974 she developed a unique stage persona to front the band. Though she may have appeared to fans as a hyper-femme caricature, Harry recalls her role as androgynous or "transexual" in her 2019 memoir Face It. In the third episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Cornell University professor of music Judith Peraino, and University of Iowa cultural studies professor Kembrew McLeod about the stylistic and social forces that shaped gender-bending bands like Blondie and others in the early “punk” scene in 1970s New York.

Judith…